A Refuge in Thunder

Description

[An important] detailing of the development and evolution of a major institution of the African Diaspora [and] of Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian identity." —Sheila S. Walker

The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé has long been recognized as an extraordinary resource of African tradition, values, and identity among its adherents in Bahia, Brazil. Outlawed and persecuted in the late colonial and imperial period, Candomblé nevertheless developed as one of the major religious expressions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Drawing principally on primary sources, such as police archives, Rachel E. Harding describes the development of the religion as an "alternative" space in which subjugated and enslaved blacks could gain a sense of individual and collective identity in opposition to the subaltern status imposed upon them by the dominant society.

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Table of Contents

Contents

AcknowledgementsIntroduction

1. Slavery, Africanos Libertos and the Question of Black Presence in Nineteenth-Century Brazil2. Salvador: The Urban Environment3. The Bolsa de Mandinga and Calundu: Afro-Brazilian Religion as Fetish and Fetiçaria 4. "Dis Continuity," Context and Documentation: Origins and Interpretations of the Religion5. The Nineteenth-Century Development of Candomblé6. Healing and Cultivating Axé: Profiles of Candomblé Leaders and Communities7. Networks of Support, Spaces of Resistance: Alternative Orientations of Black Life in Nineteenth-Century Bahia8. Candomblé as Feitiço: Reterritorialization, Embodiment and the Alchemy of History in an Afro-Brazilian ReligionCoda: Abolition, Freedom and Candomblé as Alternative Cidadania in Brazil.